USDA issues “food desert” locator

No less than the USDA has issued a new “food desert locator” today, a direct outgrowth of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” anti-obesity campaign. The First Lady has brought to the mainstream many ideas about food and poverty once considered limited to the city limits of Berkeley. More significantly, the campaign has shifted the USDA bureaucracy away from a heavy focus on grain subsidies to healthy food. That’s dramatic.

A food desert is an area of high poverty with little access to supermarkets or other sources of fresh food. The locator was developed by USDA’s respected Economic Research Service.

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said the locator is designed to “help policy makers, community planners, researchers, and other professionals identify communities where public-private intervention can help make fresh, healthy, and affordable food more readily available to residents.”

Low-income areas are defined as: “areas where at least 20 percent of the people are at or below the federal poverty levels for family size, or where median family income for the tract is at or below 80 percent of the surrounding area’s median family income. Tracts qualify as ‘low access’ tracts if at least 500 persons or 33 percent of their population live more than a mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (for rural census tracts, the distance is more than 10 miles).”

By these criteria, about 10 percent of the 65,000 U.S. census tracts are food deserts, containing 13.5 million people, 82 percent of whom live in urban areas.

The food desert locator comes after USDA’s Food Environment Atlas which collects statistics on food choices, health and community characteristics such as income.